Angolapact Lacks A Key Signatory

HUAMBO, ANGOLA — Exhausted by 13 years of war, this crumbling provincial capital warily dares to hope that a peace accord signed by Cuba, Angola and South Africa will allow rebuilding to begin.

``Yes, we are beginning to hope here,`` says Joao Pinto Machado, district director for the Benguela railroad, surveying the remains of what once was the largest railroad repair complex in Africa.

But long-suffering residents are concerned that U.S-backed rebels, who are not party to the regional peace agreement, will roll in from the bush as Cuban troops roll out.

Last May, for the first time in the long war, guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi`s U.S.-backed Movement for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA) shut down the railroad and burned 11 new locomotives.

The guerrillas returned in June to place a dozen bombs around the complex, destroying offices and machinery, said Pinto. The repair shops remain in a shambles; logs instead of lumber prop up shaky walls and replace damaged roof beams.

During the early 1970s, when the nation was a Portuguese colony, as many as 20 trains a day carried passengers and produce between this town in Angola`s lush central plateau to the Atlantic coast. Now most supplies are brought to Huambo by air.

Occasionally, a truck convoy will make its way up a steep, winding highway that is prone to guerrilla attack. A year ago, the guerrillas briefly overran three towns along the route.

``It`s going to get better now,`` insists Armando Augusto, director of the government-owned Hotel Roma, which was bombed Oct. 14 for the second time. He concedes that conditions can`t get much worse, with shortages now rampant. On Dec. 20, guerrillas attacked the city`s brewery, placing bombs beside one of the few freshly painted walls in the city, a huge propaganda mural that declared: ``Angola will be the resolute trench of the revolution in Africa.`` ``The situation is in our favor,`` agrees Deputy District Commissioner Poulo Jimi, who received a group of journalists in the faded gold-brocade ballroom of the former Portugese colonial administration building, now the

``Palace of the People.``

``With the accords in New York, we hope soon to have peace, not just in Angola but here in Huambo,`` he said, as bulbs flickered dimly in a dusty chandelier.

The settlement signed Dec. 22 in New York calls for Cuba to withdraw 55,000 troops from Angola by mid-1991 in return for an agreement by South Africa to grant independence to Namibia this year.

South Africa, which supplied about three-quarters of Savimbi`s war materiel, also agreed to stop aiding the rebels. But the treaty did not include Savimbi, whose support comes from Angola`s largest tribe, the Ovimbundu of the central highlands surrounding Huambo.

For the moment, Savimbi has been lying low, breaking his past pattern of increasing attacks during the wet season, which is now underway. Cuba began withdrawing the first of its troops on Jan. 10 amid official fanfare.

The Angolan government has declared an amnesty for UNITA followers beginning next month, but has categorically refused to talk with Savimbi. President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has rejected a proposal from other African leaders to have Savimbi temporarily step aside while other UNITA leaders join in an interim government.

An official tour of Huambo earlier this month that had been designed to discredit UNITA instead made it clear that Savimbi`s guerrillas can strike at will.

Savimbi held Huambo as his ``capital`` for six months after the civil war began in 1975. Once home to 80,000 people, it was deserted by its inhabitants and then choked with refugees.

A key indication of the residents` suffering is a recent survey by UNICEF that found as many as half of all children in the province die before age 5, one of the highest infant-mortality rates ever measured.

``They are at the limit of normal survival,`` said one official in Luanda, the capital. ``There is a chronic lack of food-a wave of malnutrition between November and March, when the people eat only sweet potatoes.``

Joao Manuel Oliviera De Silva, the manager of a bombed-out food depot, said in response to a question about hunger: ``It is relative. Around here, we think if you go without eating four or five days that`s hunger.``

Almost nothing moves on the baking city streets except an occasional Soviet-built military vehicle and the women carrying bags of charcoal on their heads, fuel for the cooking fires that have sooted the pastel facades of apartment blocks built by the Portugese.

When Soviet transport planes take off from the airport, they do so in a tight spiral, dropping bright magnesium flares to divert any heat-seeking missiles. Along the airport road, the rusting wrecks of planes and helicopters testify to the threat.